How ancient man honed his DIY skills

These bones come from aurochs - ancient wild cows - and show marks made by the flint tools they were butchered withTimes photographer Richard Pohle

About 400,000 years ago, the simple hand axe gave way to specialist alternatives including blades, projectiles and stone flakes. In one of humanity’s great technological advances, our ancestors went from tool users to toolkit users.

Researchers now believe they have identified what was behind this crucial transition: an unpredictable climate.

The reason for our shift into what is known as the Middle Stone Age has long been debated. Not only did early humans become better at shaping tools, some archaeologists believe that these artefacts were also traded, fulfilling some of the functions of money. What made us become so much cleverer?

For a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers looked at sediment cores from Lake Magadi, in Kenya’s Rift Valley,…

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